"Appropriation has become not passe but so ubiquituous as to be beyond notice...appropriation has become the dominant trend in contemporary art practice, and that appropriated material no longer need signify anything in particular: not the death of the author, not a critique of mass-media representation, not a comment on consumer capitalism. On the contrary, it seems that appropriation is a tool of the new subjectivism, with the artist's choice of pre-existing images or references representing a bid for authenticity (my record collection, my childhood snaps, my favourite supermodel)"
This is interesting in the sense that appropriation (or at least the recycling of images, video, text, etc.) is the natural language of the internet. Or, to put it another way, the medium of the internet is conducive to appropriation as a form of language for communication. Our goal is to use appropriation to think philosophy through the medium of the internet. We also want to introduce the Unthought to our public policy topic. So...
If appropriation, the readymade, detournement, postproduction, etc. are all the same thing, then we can combine the lessons of each (from the articles in Appropriation) into our own set of instructions - in the case of my band, the 4 Laws of Detournement, simplified here:
- the more distant the association the more greater the impression.
- keep it simple stupid - the recontextualization will do all the work.
- the more the appropriation seems like an rational answer the less effective it is.
- simply positing the opposite is lazy and the least effective way of using detournement.
Since we are working towards adapting philosophy for the internet, we must keep this goal in mind at all times and try to have our appropriations serve this purpose (although shooting into the dark isn't a bad thing either)
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